David Allen and GTD in the Book “Reinventing Organizations”

The new book by Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness gives David Allen and GTD credit for inspiring, and pioneering, new approaches to managing organizations.

We highly recommend the book, and below are the snippets we’re talking about as a teaser for a terrific read!

We’re first mentioned in this section about how Brian Robertson developed Holacracy:

“Robertson and his two co-founders started experimenting relentlessly with any organizational practice that sounded promising. Where the ideas came from didn’t matter—inspiration was found in places as different as agile software development, sociocracy, and David Allen’s Getting Things Done.”

Then, regarding cultural traits in self-managing organizations:

“Self-managing structures transcend the issue of culture versus systems. Inner and outer dimensions, culture and systems, work hand in hand, not in opposite directions. Power is naturally distributed and there is no need to invest time and effort to prod middle manages to “empower” people below them. If managers have no weapons, there is no need to invest in a culture that keeps people from using their weapons. This is the experience that David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame, had when he adopted Holacracy in his consulting and training firm, the David Allen Company: ‘As we’ve distributed accountability down and throughout the organization, I’ve had much less of my attention on the culture. In an operating system that’s dysfunctional, you need to focus on things like values in order to make that somewhat tolerable, but if we’re all willing to pay attention to the higher purpose, and do what we do and do it well, the culture just emerges. You don’t have to force it.'”

This David Allen quote in the second item is taken from a Holacracy.org blog post by Roberston.  If you’d like to dive deeper, you can read that article by clicking here.

Reinventing Organizations

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